Thanks for speaking with us Aisha, Archer won our reader’s poll for best spy TV in 2011 and is off to a strong Season 3, and you’ve also been on 24 and now XIII, a Canadian spy series.
Aisha Tyler: I will say, first of all, that I grew up having much of my free time supervised by my dad, my single dad. I grew up loving action movies and being obsessed with that genre. I’ve seen Die Hard like 40 or 50 times. So I just love that whole world. I just love all of that stuff. And I have played a spy now three times; how interesting.
What is it about spy TV that you’re particularly drawn to and love and maybe how does Archer fit in the lexicon of spy TV?
AT: In the spy firmament? I’m drawn to interesting, competitive, strong women–that’s the first thing. Women who are doing something that is complex and interesting. I love the idea of characters in peril, generally. I always like the idea about ordinary people going through extraordinary circumstances or extraordinary conditions. So I find that very appealing.
It’s not that I don’t like other kinds of character driven drama, but I like when people are called on to make extreme personal sacrifice on behalf of others. That’s always been a theme that I’ve been attracted to in my work as an actor and also when I’ve been writing or committing to other projects.
Like when someone has to go through—and that may go back to when I loved Die Hard. You have this kind of regular cop who’s got to walk barefoot across glass to save his wife down at the—what was it called, … Tower? I’ll think of it in a minute. Someone will think of it. So I love that stuff. I just find that to be a really compelling set of conditions because people have to kind of reach outside of themselves and find a strength that they didn’t know they had in order to do something extraordinary, usually for other people, not for themselves. So I think that’s why I like the spy genre.
I think that Archer—I often describe it as James Bond meets The Office where everybody is drunk and having sex with each other. How that fits into the spy firmament, I can’t tell you. But what I love about it is that it can be a very absurd office comedy, but also there’s this nice legitimate edge to it where they do go on real missions and they do engage in espionage that feels as real as a cartoon show about spies can feel and there’s real peril. I love that about it too. There’s this kind of odd mix of competency and extreme competency that goes on and I imagine that exists in the real world of espionage as well.
Source: Full interview @ Buzz Focus
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